When the Supreme Court released its Hobby Lobby decision Monday creating religious freedom rights for closely held corporations and allowing the religious beliefs of employers to dictate employee health plans, people from all positions on the political spectrum predictably took to Twitter to voice outrage, support, and confusion. But as the afternoon wore on, a pattern began to emerge: Progressive female writers pointed out that the decision singled out women's health care and was written by five men (the three female Supreme Court justices dissented), calling it misogynist and hostile to female sexuality. Many of the loudest conservative supporters of the Hobby Lobby decision responded by saying sexism wasn't the issue, religious liberty was, and there's no War on Women or misogyny or antagonism to women having sex coming from the political right — an argument that inevitably concluded with some variation of, "If you sluts don't want to get pregnant, then keep your legs closed."

That women face abuse online is not news. According to the organization Working to Halt Online Abuse, women account for 70 percent of people on the receiving end of online harassment and stalking. In one study, researchers joined chat rooms using fake accounts, and found that the accounts with male names averaged 3.7 threatening or sexually explicit messages per day. Those with female names saw 100.

Particularly striking about the #HobbyLobby comments, though, was how they belied the very premise of conservative opposition to the contraception mandate challenged in the case. Hobby Lobby and its supporters argue the case has nothing to do with being anti-sex or anti-woman; it's simply about religious freedom. Women's rights activists point out that opposition to contraception access is fundamentally about control and brings us back half a century to when women were less able to control the number and spacing of their children — and, as a result, significantly less equal.

Demanding that women close our legs and calling us whores for planning our pregnancies confirms the feminist suspicion that opposition to contraception and abortion is less about "life" than it is about a sense that sexually active women are doing something wrong and should be chastened for it.

IF YOU WANT TO BE A WHORE & SLEEP W/ EVERY MAN YOU FIND PAY FOR YOUR OWN BIRTH CONTROL. 10 BUCKS AT WALGREENS. SO GO BE WHORE'S #HobbyLobby

The advent of the birth control pill and the subsequent Supreme Court cases that made both the pill and abortion legal for women in the United States ushered in social changes so vast it's difficult to overstate their impact. More women attend college and graduate school than ever before, and more women work outside the home. Maternal mortality and injury have decreased significantly, women live longer, and our children are healthier. Many of the rights we take for granted — having our own credit cards and checking accounts, divorcing an abusive partner, being able to report domestic violence to the police — were hard-won feminist victories that went hand in hand with the rights to bodily autonomy and sexual privacy.

And that's exactly why far-right conservatives are so opposed to contraception: They correctly realize that it allows women freedoms that were once nearly impossible but for a privileged few. And their ideal society hinges on a family with the husband as head and the wife as a "helpmeet." Contraception inches her closer to being an equal player.

That, fundamentally, is what the online insults and the clashes over Hobby Lobby are about: two conflicting views of what society should be. There's the heterosexual traditional family model promoted by social conservatives, where sexuality is tightly controlled and unacceptable outside of narrow circumstances, men are in charge, husbands are the heads of households and wives are "helpmeets" — a model that doesn't work without coercion. And there's the progressive feminist model, where human sexuality is considered normal and healthy, and a variety of familial and social models are available along with the freedom for individuals to choose what works best for them.

People like to have sex, as evidenced by the fact that 95 percent of Americans have sex before marriage, and the only way to rein that in to reach the conservative ideal is to make sex shameful and dangerous. The stigma and shame once attached to premarital sex has rapidly declined in the past several decades, so right-wing legislators have doubled down on efforts to make sex dangerous. When you hear people complain that women want to have "sex without consequences," that's what they're talking about — that it would be a bad thing if sex didn't come with some sort of penalty, at least for women. And as technology, medicine, and general social progress attaches fewer and fewer physical and social penalties to sex, the folks who dislike those changes have to create artificial ones.

Hobby Lobby isn't the first time religious employers tried to assert their beliefs as a justification for denying services or discriminating. In her Hobby Lobby dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg notes other cases where religious company owners objected to generally applicable laws because of their religious beliefs: a restaurant owner who did not want to serve black customers, since his religious beliefs included racial segregation; health care club owners who refused to hire any single women who didn't have their fathers' permission to work, any married women who didn't have their husbands' permission, anyone living with a member of the opposite sex outside of marriage, and anyone "antagonistic to the Bible," including "fornicators and homosexuals."

Hobby Lobby, though, succeeded where those cases largely failed. And in the wake of that success, enter the enthusiastic harassment of women who criticize the decision.

For women, having an opinion on the Internet virtually guarantees you'll face abuse, often the sexualized kind. But it's especially rich seeing misogynist and sexually hostile commentary come from the very people who claim women are just being hysterical when we characterize the Hobby Lobby case as misogynist and hostile to sex.

For many women writing about Hobby Lobby online, the volume of attacks on Monday was particularly exhausting. It also handily proved our point.

@JessicaValenti will you host a gangbang...er, I mean a fuck in at my local #HobbyLobby I've got 16 biker friends just dying to "meat" you